Okay, so THAT was a fun time.  Not all of it was a barrel of monkeys, but it was still a really fun time.

The Japanese TV show is called "The World's Astonishing News!" - the episode is about a little girl with some illness that causes her to be hungry all the time and gain lots of weight - she weighed over 400lbs before she was 9 - and her mother just fed her whenever she was hungry, and pretty high-calorie food.  I was called in to play the mother, the story was explained to me roughly and I was asked if I was comfortable with the scenes, etc.  Of course, the script is in Japanese and would be dubbed, so I couldn't really read the script ahead of time - always a bit of a gamble, but sounded like a fun gig and an interesting story, so I said HECK YEAH I'd go to San Francisco to shoot that!

So I flew in to San Francisco at about 5:30 at night, just enough time for it to be really dark, rainy and cold when I arrived.  And of course, when I DID arrive I had no idea what to do - so I got my bag, called my contact, and was told there was a woman coming to pick me up.  Cool.  Long story short, got picked up at the airport by a super-cool chick named Akiko, taken to the Hotel Milano in the middle of San Francisco (across from the Mint and around the corner from the end of the cable car line), checked in, and left on my own until the next day.  AWESOME start.   Had some really excellent Thai food at the hotel restaurant and relaxed since I still didn't know my call time for the next day - finally at around 11 I found out I had to be in the lobby the next morning at 9am - sooooo nice to know it wasn't going to be a super-early morning - went to bed.

So the next morning I get up, take my entire suitcase of clothing downstairs with me and meet the director and crew before driving to the 'burbs to shoot.  Since this is a Japanese TV show, the production peeps are all Japanese.  And the director and camera guy don't speak English outside of "Pleased to meet you" and "Thank you" and "Good."  Which is fine.   Hiroki, the translator, is a super-cool guy from LA with a great sense of humor and the whole crew is laid-back and fun, really nice group.  As we're driving to the house where we're shooting for the day, we cross the Golden Gate Bridge, which was a real treat for someone who grew up knowing San Francisco only from the Rice-a-Roni commercials and the movie "I Remember Mama", which somehow I saw at least a million times....  Anyway, so the weather's let up a bit and the bay isn't foggy or anything and the surrounding area is just geographically so beautiful - it's a GORGEOUS city.  GORGEOUS.  I cannot stress this enough.  Even the downtown areas are just somehow so much prettier than the average city.  But I digress.  We get to the house and I meet my castmates - my pretend husband Sonny and my pretend daughter Sara (who plays the oldest version of my daughter).  We take some digital pix and proceed with the shoot.  So due to the nature of the story, scenes are going to fall into a few categories - eating lots of bad-for-you food (how the child gained the weight), family dynamics (the father was killed when the girl was little, scenes of parents with happy baby, etc), and medical intervention (the poor girl was so heavy she was at imminent risk of a heart attack and child protective services intervened to mandate that the girl go to a weight-loss clinic for her mother to retain custody, etc).  The first day was the day of bad eating at home.  So lots of bad, greasy food completely covering the table, lots of shots of us eating (too much and too fast, which is the part I found very distasteful - but I did realize that for this child to get that heavy that young, the eating had to have been a bit more extreme than how I eat, etc), a couple shots of me mourning my lost husband, some of us playing with the baby (baby Sofia is the cutest baby girl on the planet), shots of my daughter (the middle one, Brady) demanding more food and refusing salad, etc.... and did I mention shots of us eating?

Here's where it gets really interesting to me, on a "how they make it" level.  I had heard about food commercials and how the actors have spit buckets so they don't have to actually eat the food, and I always thought that sounded a little ridiculous.  After all, it's not like McDonald's isn't yummy, even if you KNOW it's bad for you, how hard can it be to eat a couple cheeseburgers? 

Um, yeah.  Julie's about to have a real learning experience.  Thankfully, Sara's a pro and she informs the production team as we sit down to our first eating scene that she will need to spit out the food in-between takes, so they're prepared.  I watch this with slight amusement but I'm impressed with her poise and confidence.  Then we start eating.  I quickly realize several things.

A.  I'm not hungry.  We've eaten breakfast and lunch.
B.  If you are going to take really big bites of food, you're going to have too much in your mouth to chew and swallow comfortably.
C.  If you're doing multiple takes, you're going to consume a lot of food, in combinations and quantities that don't come naturally to you.
D.  Food gets cold very quickly.
E.  Food gets gross very quickly when reheated multiple times.
F.  Gross food gets grosser when presented in large quantities - especially if it's, say, prepackaged pot roast, grocery store fried chicken, potato salad, canned spaghetti and meatballs, microwaved mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, pizza, and ribs.  Oh, and a small bowl of salad.

Takes about 20 seconds to realize you're going to be spitting into a plastic bag that some very sweet and surely underpaid PA is holding for you.  Thank god for paper towels.

HOWEVER - luckily everyone on set is super-awesome.  I wore about 10 different top combinations that first day and went home pretty sick to my stomach.   But I went home after having learned a TON, having some really good acting moments, making a baby smile repeatedly and not dropping her once, enjoying a really pretty view out to the bay, and meeting some nice people.  And Naomichi drove me around the city on the way back to the hotel so I could see a little of it - we drove through Chinatown, Little Italy, down Lombard Street (which will turn you into a squealing, babbling, delighted idiot soooo fast, it's amazingly fun), etc.   And then I took a cable car down to the wharf, walked around, had a decent dinner (I seem to have a habit of ordering the WRONG THING at restaurants, but the atmosphere rocked), and took the cable car back... getting a full explanation of how the thing works, where the let-gos are, where the cable ends, penalties for breaking the system by ignoring a let-go, etc...   AWESOME CITY.

Day two - 9:30am call time, SO happy.  I'm not a morning person, and my least favorite thing about acting is an early call time.   Don't get me wrong, if I have to be up early that's one of the two best reasons for it (the other is going on a trip somewhere), but if I have my choice I'll pick a later time.   We gather and head to Golden Gate Park to film some scenes of the little girl having trouble playing at the playground because of her weight.  Now, this is the playground from heaven.  It's the prettiest playground I've ever seen.  It's in a beautiful hollow of a beautiful park in a beautiful city, next to an old carousel and an art school and a lawn bowling area....  My job is to comfort a cute girl (stuffed to the gills with towels and duct tape) and walk a few steps.  I can't believe I get paid for this... until I remember the fried chicken from the day before.  Oog.  Next is lunch.  Now, we just ate breakfast when we met at 9:30, but it's lunchtime.  I go for a salad.  You know I'm full if I'm eating salad.  Okay, so it had some fried chicken on it (but GOOD fried chicken!), but still.  It's a salad.  Our next location - the gelato shop.  Rough life, having to eat gelato.  This is basically a montage of "eating junk food" with people looking at us eating junk food.  Except this junk food tastes good.  So I eat about half an ice cream cone (no spitting this time) before someone hands me a chocolate frosted donut.  Okay, so junk food and salad for lunch.  More scenes of us eating junk food.  Then comes the pizza.  Thankfully, I don't have to eat the pizza - just get in the car and hand a slice to my daughter.  I should probably say that I had it pretty easy - as Mom, I'm usually making HER eat rather than eating myself - I got off easy compared to these kids.  Anyway, after the junk food montage (god knows how it'll be shown in the show, that's just how I think of it in my head) we went to the supermarket to shoot the "buying tons of food" scene - which was fine except that there were people actually SHOPPING there, which meant that my little social anxiety of being in tight, crowded spaces where I'm in the way kicked in for a moment or two, but still - no big deal.  Push cart down aisle, tell, girl it's fine to get the cookies?  I can handle that.  Put groceries on checkout belt?  Again, good.  Several takes here (to get the little girls staring at us to actually stare at us - working with small kids is a challenge, cute as they are!) - take the food out of the cart, put it back in the cart, take it out of the cart, put it back in the cart....   Long break after these shots, hung out at the local coffee shop for an hour or so before going to our Last Location!

Last location is a medical clinic we're using as a fake ER/hospital, where we're shooting two types of scenes.  First, I'm there with my baby because my husband has just been killed.  Second shot I'm with the oldest version of my daughter, where I'm told that I'm killing my daughter by feeding her so much and that she's going to die if I don't get her help immediately.  Okay, so a bit more dramatic acting here, which makes me a bit nervous.  Pretty specific direction from the director though, so that helps, but it's difficult not knowing the tone of the show.  I got the impression it's a bit stylized, but is it soap-opera-like?  Understated?  Who knows?  So I just did my best and we didn't do many takes of each shot so I figure I did a great job.  

After that, a quick dash to the airport and a comfy, quiet ride home.  GREAT fun overall, not 100% comfy with the content we filmed but I learned so much from the experience - working with a director who doesn't speak your language, on a show you don't know anything about, with kids and set nurses and studio teachers, etc - really interesting and fun time.  Met some fabulous fabulous people too, got to see some of a beautiful city... yeah, I'd do it again.  I think.   DEFINITELY if there's no eating involved!